Guys and Gals, brace yourselves. I just found this poll on Gallup and almost had a heart attack.

This one shows that even with all of our technological feats and advantages, the percentage of people that think their god created humans in the PRESENT form in the last 10,000 years is on the INCLINE. I just cannot believe that in the United States of America, the supposed most enlightened and innovative country in the world, that this statistic even still exists. Even though I am relatively young, I always that that young earth creationism was a far off minority of the Christian family. I NEVER expected this feeble, narrow-minded world view to be so popular in any part of the world. We have taught evolution and science thoroughly in the US for about 50 years, yet the adults in this nation STILL believe the indoctrinated lies they received in their childhood. This is either evidence of the failure of scientific public schooling or a triumph for the religious institutions most of us are far too familiar with.

Here are the numbers as of 2012, they speak for themselves.

Here we can see the progression of the question of origins throughout the higher education levels. First, we can see the obvious, the high school students that come into high school with their already indoctrinated minds. This is partly because the US doesn't teach evolution until the freshman year in high school and the thoroughness of this teaching is rarely where it should be, given the importance. Then we see a slight tapering through the first degree of college a student takes, probably because their degree has nothing to do with our origins, yet we see some of them figure it out. Then the postgraduates really come through with a drop of almost half in the percentage that identify as young earth creationists. Maybe these people expand their research on their own to challenge their dogmatic ideas, yet we still see they can't shake the god delusion because of the 42% voting for the god+evolution category. I wish the number on the right continued to decrease but as we have seen, it doesn't and probably even increases again.

The challenges that the US faces with the constant on-slot of creationism in schools advocates and religious apologetics in government are one of the biggest problems we face today. I advocate that atheists take a more strident, challenging stance on religion. We should really ask why these people think the way they do because I would expect at least half only believe because of their harsh childhood surrounded by fundamentalist and dogmatic doctrine. There is no reason that in 2013 we need these ancient fairy tales to sooth our worries, and especially don't need them to teach us science. As a society we need to grow up and face the world the way it really is, whilst encouraging inquiry based on evidence over religious dogmatism.

As rational people we should be able to peacefully do away with these obsolete and immoral ideas just by asking the tough, inescapable questions. We should not back down when a religious person plays the victim card and claims we need to respect them when they do things like protest the teaching of science and the rights of gays based on their holy book. The time has come to stop the child abuse of teaching nonsense to kids and letting them grow up ignorant of the scientific discoveries we have made over the last hundred years. It's time to end this upward battle of scientific literacy trying to topple the religious irrationality. We have already seen what happens when you let religious ideas run unchallenged for hundreds of years, nothing progresses at all other than the increase in churches' wealth and power to the detriment of all the lay people. Do any of you want this to happen again?

Disclaimer: I am not advocating encouraging laws against religious belief or doing anything of the sort. If these people really have to believe in their holy texts and their gods, then we have to let them do it. But for goodness sake, we can't let them teach this backward nonsense without a fight or we will get absolutely nowhere as a species.

To be fair, the poll shows that the YEC option has been going up and down for the past 30 years. As of last year, it was only 2% higher than it was at the beginning of the study. I think the more important thing to note is that the "god had no part in the process" option has gone UP for the last 10 years.

Sure, it's not good that we live in a modern society with so many who have archaic beliefs, but at least the "good" option is on the rise.

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid,
and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
- Bertrand Russel

"For results based on the total sample of national adults, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points."
Thanks for the catch, now I know to include this in the studies I post, thanks a lot!